Today, in this shared post we publish between Gradiant and ElevenPaths in our respective blogs, we share a use case in which SealSign and Shadow technologies work together to increase the security of the documents to be signed digitally, either using biometric handwritten signature or certificated signature.

Long story short, Shadow allows inserting an invisible watermark into text documents, a mark that can be identified later.That is, Shadow engine allows the insertion of a digital watermark in PDF documents, so that even though the document has not been modified, watermark can be extracted and validated even when the document has been printed or scanned.Shadow guarantees the traceability of documents in both digital and paper format.

And how does this technology combines with digital signature?SealSign can include digital signatures in documents for any use case, such as signing work contracts, informed consents or any document for the public administration, among others.So by combining both technologies, the security of documents can be increased in a fully transparent manner for the user.

Imagine that a taxpayer goes to Treasury to clarify a matter related to the 2016 Income Tax. After making the necessary consultations and procedures, the officer tells the taxpayer to sign, in thenew tablets of the Administration, a document reflecting existing mortgages.This user is going to sign a document digitally where not only is going to identify himself but in addition, the Administration could verify the signature of the user to avoid frauds.But that’s not all.Also this digital document to be kept and confidential, is added a unique watermark that identifies the official who has treated this document.The official takes this document and in addition to saving it, decides to make a printed copy and take it home.Coincidentally, the following morning, this document appears published in the newspapers and the mortgages of this user are known to everyone… Not good.

So the public administration decides to find out where this information leak occurred.Thanks to the inserted watermark, the administration can now know who has printed the document and find out where the information leak came from.

This is just one example of the combined strenght of SealSign and Shadow: we can not only identify the perpetrators of the information leaks, but also improve user experience when signing documents, and verifying the identity of the signer.